Black artists’ work forces a new look at history
African diaspora art is a must-see at the Smart Museum
major fine art buyers today: the desire for unique items of great beauty, a proximity to the elite echelons of the creative classes, the thrill of high-stakes acquisitions, the possibility of “artwashing” dubious riches and, increasingly, great investment opportunities. If some of the more benign of these explanations apply, they are nevertheless overwritten by Joyner and Giuffrida’s central mission — even by the very fact of having one, a rarity among collectors.
Joyner laid out their plans in a 2017 interview: “For us it comes from a place of being committed to excellence — and equality. As I say, race is simply not a good lens through which to view art. But when the quality is there and has been overlooked, that’s where our mission comes in: the attempt to reframe art history, to put these excellent works into the full context of the canon. If that’s a quest for social justice, I’m guilty of it.”
Proceeding strategically, Joyner and Giuffrida have built a collection of approximately 400 works, beginning with African-American artists and eventually expanding to the entire African diaspora. They’ve stuck mainly with abstract painting, but they have made some exceptions along the way. They’ve focused on certain artists in depth, discovered affinities and personal connections between others and decided to act as stewards of individual careers.
What this sounds like is generous and wise, and what it looks like is knock‘em-dead stunning, though only a snapshot of it is on view at the Smart, where some 50 select works from the couple’s collection have been supplemented by a handful of loans and new site-specific commissions by a trio of Chicago artists.
It’s humbling too, especially for anyone schooled to believe in the canon, which traditionally has made precious little room for black artists, such as the color field painter Sam Gilliam, who so obviously deserve major places there.
The section devoted to Gilliam’s work includes the two most stirring pieces in the entire show — the symphonically effervescent “After Glow,” an enormous stained canvas from 1972, and “Stand,” a rainbowhued swath of unstretched fabric bunched at the top and hung from a leather strap, one part drop cloth, one part laundry-hung-outto-dry, one part sculpture.
Curated by Christopher Bedford and Katy Siegel of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the traveling show, which opened at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans in September 2017, positions abstraction as an especially fraught choice for black artists, continually under pressure to create a representational art that either matches racial stereotypes of their identity or conforms to community desire for uplift.
The free expression granted white artists by birthright, especially white male artists, hasn’t been theirs. And yet they’ve claimed it: in Norman Lewis’ scratchy, staccato and uncommonly charming abstract expressionism; in Charles Gaines’ rigorously data-driven translations of trees and explosions; in Leonardo Drew’s exhaustively pieced-together wooden reliefs, so much more than the sum of their thousands of tiny parts; in Shinique Smith’s endlessly swirly collage paintings (though I sorely wish her hanging sculptures had been included too).
As with any really good group exhibition, regardless of the premise, every visitor will find his or her own way. Mine included major stops at a set of five steel clusters, welded by Melvin Edwards from thick chains, padlocks, fencing, heavy bolts, a trowel, silverware, spikes and ax heads — none of them blunted. Part of the “Lynch Fragments” series begun in 1963 and showing no signs of stopping (the examples here are from the 1990s and 2000s), they are unapologetically fierce, literal, reconstructive and entirely new to me.
A grouping of seven wall pieces by Jennie C. Jones, all precisely constructed from musical materials such as piano keys and acoustic absorber panels, marks my favorite presentation of her work yet: abounding in wit and restraint, a muted palette aglow with spare touches of neon yellow and hot pink. Two eerily beautiful sculptures by Kevin Beasley — the youngest artist in the show and the hottest — belie the humdrum flowered housedresses and Yankees caps out of which they are constructed.
Carved up, stiffened by resin, propped up by foam or hung on a television stand, they retain their origins while moving on to something unexpectedly transcendent. That could be a motto for the entire collection.
“Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection” runs through May 19 at the Smart Museum of Art, 5550 South Greenwood Ave., 773-702-0200, smart museum.uchicago.edu.